9/5/2019

speaker
Host
Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CrowdStrike Fiscal Second Quarter 2020 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, so if anyone should require assistance during the call, please press star, then zero on your touchtone telephone to reach an operator. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please press star, then one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, today's conference may be recorded. I'd now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Maria Riley, Senior Director of Investor Relations. And please go ahead.

speaker
Maria Riley
Senior Director of Investor Relations

Good afternoon, and thank you for your participation today. With me on the call are George Kurtz, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder of CrowdStrike, and Burt Podbear, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to note that certain statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, and expected performance are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. While we believe any forward-looking statements we have made are reasonable, actual results could differ materially because the statements are based on our current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties. We do not undertake and expressively disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Further information on these and other factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in the filings we make with the SEC from time to time, including the section titled Risk Factors and the company's form S1 previously filed with the SEC. Also, unless otherwise stated, excluding revenue, all financial measures discussed on this call will be non-GAAP. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation schedule showing GAAP versus non-GAAP results is currently available in our press release, which may be found on our investor relations website at .crowdstrike.com or on our form 8K filed with the SEC today. Now I will turn the call over to George to begin.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Thank you, Maria, and thank you all for joining us today. We delivered a strong second quarter with rapid subscription revenue growth and record net new ARR generated in the quarter. Year over year, we achieved 104% ARR growth, 98% subscription revenue growth, and 94% total revenue growth, which was above the high end of our guidance. We also continued to expand our subscription gross margin and operating leverage. We believe these strong results demonstrate our growing leadership in the security cloud category, which we estimate the global market opportunity to be $24.6 billion in 2019 and growing to over $29 billion in 2021. Bert will discuss the details of our Q2 financial performance in a few moments, but first I will provide a quick update on the progress we made over the past few months in this large and growing market. CrowdStrike stops breaches and we are transforming endpoint security. Our clear technology differentiation is driving our growth, which continues to significantly outpace the industry. In addition to stopping breaches, we help customers simplify their security stack with our single agent architecture and cloud modules. This sets us apart from others in the security industry and a growing number of organizations around the world recognize the power of CrowdStrike's cloud native Falcon platform. To measure our success executing our platform strategy, we look at the percentage of all subscription customers that have adopted four or more cloud modules. This percentage rapidly grew to 30% by the end of fiscal 2018 and then to 47% by the end of fiscal 2019. I'm pleased to announce that in Q2 we reached a new milestone with 50% of our subscription customers having adopted four or more cloud modules. The strength of CrowdStrike's Falcon platform is also rapidly gaining industry recognition. As we recently announced, CrowdStrike was positioned as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for endpoint protection platforms. This report evaluates vendors based upon completeness of vision and their ability to execute. Of all EPP vendors, CrowdStrike was positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision. We believe CrowdStrike's placement in the leaders quadrant validates that our single agent architecture, proprietary threat graph database, and cloud modules represent the standard in securing the growing workloads of today and the future. In placing CrowdStrike as a leader, Gartner also cited our extensible platform and the CrowdStrike Store, the first and only unified security cloud ecosystem of trusted third party applications. To help foster innovation within the CrowdStrike Store ecosystem, we have established the Falcon Fund in partnership with Excel. CrowdStrike Falcon's cloud native open API architecture was built to provide a shared security ecosystem where developers and partners could dramatically shape the future of security and IT operations. Through the CrowdStrike Store, third party applications can be developed utilizing the massive amounts of endpoint data that our lightweight agent already collects. The Falcon Fund will invest in the next generation of innovators who are leveraging the Falcon platform to solve the most pressing security and IT challenges. We believe our rapid revenue growth at scale and customer acquisition also demonstrate the power of our true cloud native platform to stop breaches. In Q2, we once again saw an acceleration in customer growth with a record 730 net new subscription customers in the quarter, bringing our customer count to 3,789. By unlocking the power of crowdsourced data it consumes, each new customer and endpoint or workload joining our crowdsourced network increases our effectiveness, intelligence, and competitive advantage. To further highlight our differentiation, initial adoption drivers of the Falcon platform, and our ability to leverage a low friction, high velocity sales model, I will take a moment to share the success we are seeing with our partners and customers. First on the partner front, as you know, we entered into a partnership with Dell and SecureWorks earlier this year. We were chosen by Dell and SecureWorks over the competition in order to advance the industry's most secure commercial PC by offering leading endpoint protection technology from CrowdStrike. We along with Dell and SecureWorks continue to invest in this partnership and initial customer response has been positive. We are excited by the potential opportunities of this partnership, but it's still early days and only represents a small portion of our ARR. As with most partner and reseller relationships, we believe that the customer's choice will ultimately drive the success of the partnership. Given our leading position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and growing customer momentum, we are confident that customers will choose CrowdStrike. At CrowdStrike, stopping breaches extends beyond the endpoint and includes securing a wider array of workloads, including desktops, servers, mobile devices, virtualized and cloud environments, IoT devices, and containers. These workloads need to be protected and they are growing with every new connected device and every new cloud instance. An increasing number of enterprise customers are migrating to the cloud and modernizing their applications. We have made several strategic investments in our collaboration with AWS, including making our products available on the AWS Marketplace, increasing our engagement with the AWS Partner Network and integrating with core security services such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub. Over the past six months, CrowdStrike has seen a significant increase in the volume of transactions through the AWS Marketplace, in the co-selling opportunities with the AWS Sales Team, and the adoption of our AWS Service Integrations. Through the Marketplace, AWS is selling CrowdStrike to secure their customers' cloud workloads as well as endpoints that reside on the customer's corporate network. I would now like to spend a few minutes talking about some of the reasons why we win with customers across diverse verticals and geographies, regardless of size. Customers choose CrowdStrike because of our cloud-scale AI, our proven efficacy, and our extensible platform. We also win because of our immediate time to value. The first customer story highlights our ability to rapidly deploy our solution at scale. Unlike most of our competitors, our cloud-native solution is rapidly deployable because our lightweight agent is designed to be automatically installed and operational on an endpoint in less than 30 seconds without requiring a reboot and, of course, without requiring hardware. This is a key factor for customers that want to adopt a new solution rapidly without rebooting their entire business. Take the example from this quarter of a leading beverage company headquartered in Europe that was looking for a solution to provide full visibility on their endpoints and that would ultimately replace their antivirus vendor. In this competitive win, CrowdStrike Falcon was tested against an incumbent and other vendors. This new customer was blown away by the ease and speed of CrowdStrike's deployment and efficacy. They were able to turn on tens of thousands of endpoints without a single help desk ticket, leading them to standardize globally on the Falcon platform. One month after purchasing our AI-based Falcon Prevent for Next Generation AV, Insight for EDR, and Discover for IT Hygiene, they added Spotlight, our vulnerability management solution, to their Falcon platform subscription, allowing them to leverage the CrowdStrike agent and data already in place to provide scanless real-time visibility into vulnerabilities. CrowdStrike's in-app trial, which allows customers to try new modules with their own data, is a key driver of our frictionless cross-sell -to-market strategy. The second customer story I will share with you is with a global transportation network where we displaced a next-gen vendor. This organization had several of the common complaints we often hear from prospects. One, a growing concern of advanced persistent threats. Two, a lack of efficacy by the incumbent. And three, poor endpoint performance due to age and bloat. Engagement with the customer focused on the performance gains via CrowdStrike's cloud-native single-agent architecture and the business value of the CrowdStrike platform. This ultimately led to a large deal for Next Gen AV, EDR, Device Control, and our threat-hunting module, Overwatch. In Q2, we also expanded our engagement with a major U.S. airline. This customer had multiple tool sets on the endpoint, including whitelisting and a legacy antivirus, which caused complexity and age and bloat. These tools hindered their ability to build a definitive incident response workflow and limited their ability to respond to attacks. During the POC, the whitelisting incumbent put forward their cloud-based EPP offering, which failed the technical evaluation. This incumbent was not selected because it was proven to be immature, ineffective, and negatively impacted the performance of their endpoints. This customer now subscribed to five CrowdStrike cloud modules across endpoint security, security and IT operations, and threat intelligence. CrowdStrike is helping protect this customer from breaches while significantly streamlining their security stack with our single-agent architecture. And the final customer story I will share with you this quarter demonstrates how free trials are driving adoption of our platform by removing friction from the sales process and creating a high-velocity sales model. An organization based in Asia was using the signature-based AV product embedded in their operating system and was looking to enhance their security with a full EPP solution, which is capable of preventing ransomware. Starting with our free trial, this company explored the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. Impressed with the solution, the prospect engaged with our sales team and quickly became interested in and purchased our Falcon complete offering as a way to add both a true endpoint protection solution as well as a dedicated security team. From trial to close, that deal took only three weeks. Overall, the message from our customers that resonates loud and clear is that our platform is clearly unique and differentiated in the marketplace, as no other competitor is able to effectively stop breaches, reduce cost and complexity, and restore endpoint performance like CrowdStrike Falcon. Before I hand it over to Bert, I'd like to discuss our view of the consolidation in the endpoint security market that has occurred over the past few quarters. We have seen three of the larger next-gen endpoint players and the largest legacy endpoint security company decide to sell their business. These companies either originated as on-premise solutions or had an on-premise version and were unable to successfully to a true cloud-native architecture without an on-premise version. In addition to the technology barriers, many of these companies struggled converting from a mixed revenue model to a subscription-only revenue model. Ironically, as our competitors have tried to transition to a cloud architecture, it has forced their customers to look for a true cloud-native endpoint protection platform. We believe this dynamic has contributed to an expansion in our pipeline and an acceleration in our overall customer adoption. Furthermore, we view this consolidation as a strong net positive for our business and validates that cloud-native is hard and costly unless done from inception. CrowdStrike was cloud-native from day one and we enjoy a first-mover advantage in cloud-delivered endpoint protection. We have the architecture that others strive to emulate and we possess unique technology that allows us to operate effectively at scale. We believe these transactions reflect the growing distance CrowdStrike is putting between ourselves and competitors in terms of both commercial traction and our data moat, which provides us with a long-term competitive advantage. Again, this is reflected in our position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant versus all other fossilized and next-gen players. In summary, we are very pleased with our results and even more excited about the future. We continue to pioneer and define the security cloud category and have built a high-performing and enduring business with multiple engines for growth and a frictionless -to-market strategy. We believe that the market landscape has evolved in our favor and we are well positioned to capitalize on this growing opportunity. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bert.

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, George, and good afternoon, everyone. As a quick reminder, unless otherwise noted, all numbers except revenue mentioned during my remarks today are non-GAP. Across the board, we delivered an outstanding second quarter with strength in multiple areas of the business, including record net new ARR generated in the quarter, record net new customers, and strong subscription growth margin improvement. We view ARR as a key metric to measure our business. In the second quarter, we delivered 104% ARR growth year over year to reach $423.8 million, of which $59.2 million was net new ARR added in the quarter, a new record. This growth was driven by another strong quarter for new logo acquisition combined with low contraction and churn within our existing customer base. Additionally, our dollar-based net retention rate, which speaks to the efficacy of our solution in our successful land and expand sales model once again exceeded our 120% benchmark. Total revenue grew 94% over Q2 of last year to reach $108.1 million. Approximately 90% of our revenue is subscription-based with no perpetual licenses, giving us strong, scalable, recurring revenue base and a business model advantage. In the second quarter, subscription revenue grew 98% over Q2 of last year to reach $97.6 million. In terms of geographic breakdown, approximately 74% of second quarter revenue was derived from customers in the US and 26% was from international markets. Our rapidly growing international business highlights the global nature of the security industry, the massive market opportunity in front of us, and our continued success penetrating these markets. Moving to our operating results. We are focused on building a long-term business with sustainable growth and compelling margins. In Q2, we continue to recognize operating leverage in our SaaS model and the benefits of scale even as we increased investments in our global reach and cloud platform. Second quarter non-GAAP subscription gross margin improved to 73% from 67% a year ago. Our non-GAAP subscription gross margin increased to 76%, a 511 basis point increase from Q2 of last year. This improvement is primarily attributable to the continuation of the cross-functional efficiency initiatives we implemented in 2017 around hosting and data center costs. The significant progress we have made in our cloud service, cloud finance, operations, and R&D. I would like to thank the entire CrowdStrike team for their continued commitment to this initiative. The uptake of multiple cloud modules by our customer base is also a key driver of our gross margin performance as the first module subscribed to buy a customer covers the cost of data storage and most computational costs, therefore generating a very high margin with each additional subscription module. Total non-GAAP operating expenses in the second quarter were 99.1 million or 92% of revenue versus 65.4 million last year or 117% of revenue. Scaling our business efficiently is a top priority, which is why we focused on our unit economics, including magic number. In Q2, we ended with a magic number of 1.0. Key factors driving our unit economics include our strong gross and net retention rates and our highly efficient low friction sales and marketing programs that continue to drive subscription revenue growth. We have a proven history of discipline investing and remain committed to maintaining a thoughtful balance between generating top-line growth and achieving operating leverage. Going forward, we plan to make continued progress in driving toward breakeven and beyond, but it may not be in a linear fashion depending on the timing of expenses. We reported a non-GAAP operating loss of 20.6 million. As a result of our rapid top-line growth, expanding gross margin profile, and continued disciplined approach to investing in our business, we drove strong operating leverage in the quarter with our operating margin improving 31 percentage points year over year. Non-GAAP net loss was 23.1 million or 18 cents per share, which compares to a non-GAAP net loss of 30.4 million or 69 cents per share in Q2 of last year. The weighted average common shares used to calculate second quarter EPS was 130.1 million shares in Q2 fiscal 2020 and 44.1 million shares in the Q2 fiscal 2019 period. Turning now to the balance sheet, we ended Q2 with 826.8 million of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Cash flow from operations for Q2 was negative 6.2 million and free cash flow was negative 29.2 million. Moving to our guidance for the third quarter and full year fiscal 2020. For Q3, total revenue is expected to be in the range of 117.1 to 119.5 million, reflecting a -over-year growth rate of 76 to 80 percent, with subscription revenue being the dominant driver of growth. We expect non-GAAP loss from operations to be in the range of 27.7 to 26.1 million and non-GAAP net loss to be in the range of 24.8 to 23.2 million. Utilizing weighted average shares used in computing non-GAAP net loss per share basic and diluted of 204.1 million, we expect non-GAAP net loss per share basic and diluted in the range of 12 to 11 cents. We are raising our outlook for full fiscal year 2020. We currently expect total revenue to be in the range of 445.4 to 451.8 million, reflecting a growth rate of 78 to 81 percent over the 2019 fiscal year. Non-GAAP loss from operations is expected to be between 97.9 and 93.5 million, and non-GAAP net loss is expected to be between 95.3 and 90.8 million. Utilizing weighted average shares used in computing non-GAAP net loss per share basic and diluted of 147.3 million, we expect non-GAAP net loss per share to be in the range of 65 to 62 cents. We are pleased with the strong results we are reporting today and believe we have the capacity and resources to continue driving the business forward over the long term. George and I will now take your questions. Operator, we'd now like to open the lines for questions.

speaker
Host
Operator

Certainly. Our first question comes from a line of Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

speaker
Heather Bellini
Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you very much, gentlemen, and congratulations on the recent IPO. Just had a couple of questions I wanted to start out with. I mean, obviously your pace of net ads this quarter was very strong and keeps seeing really good sequential improvement. Just wondering, and I know you touched on this a little bit, George, but where you're seeing incremental traction is some of this partner driven, is this the sales force just starting to become that much more efficient? And then I wanted to follow up about the, you know, just following the FedRAMP certification, I guess a year ago now, if you could provide us an update on how that vertical is going for you. Thank you.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Sure. Thanks, Heather. So let's talk about where we're seeing some of this activity. There's a couple of areas that I focused on in my prepared remarks. Number one is AWS. We're seeing a tremendous amount of momentum as customers are looking to protect those cloud workloads. And again, when we think about our opportunity, it's not just endpoints, right? We think about workloads, and that could be an endpoint, that could be a server, it could be a mobile device, a cloud instance, what have you. So we're seeing strong demand and great partnership from AWS. We're seeing also strong conversions from our free trial, as I mentioned as well. And I think what we've seen is just a recognition of a clear separation between our technology and others in the marketplace. And that's reflected in very strong customer pull from many of our partner companies that we work with. Specifically, I think the second point of your question was around FedRAMP certification. As you know, last year we got our FedRAMP certification after the buying season. So we are very active in the FedRAMP buying season, which, as you know, wraps up at the end of September. And given the technology that we have and the ability to stop breaches, it has been very well received, not only in the Fed market, but also in state and local governments. And I think you've seen a lot of those stories specifically around ransomware. Given our AI and our machine learning, we've been able to prevent those ransomware attacks for our customers without any signature updates or any changes. So we think both Fed and state and local government are great opportunities for us. And we're really excited about those as we get into the buying season, particularly in the Fed space.

speaker
Heather Bellini
Goldman Sachs

Okay, great. Thank you.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Sterling Audi with JP Morgan. Your line is now open.

speaker
Sterling Audi
JP Morgan

Yeah, thanks. Hi, guys. George, I appreciate the comments that you gave, especially around Dell, but just to put a fine point on it, just kind of curious in terms of are you worried about anything in terms of maybe tighter technology integration into the SecureWorks platform or any type of marketing that might impact the opportunity on that -to-market channel?

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Yeah, thanks, Sterling. Let me just start with there's been a lot of consolidation in the space. And ultimately, I think it's validation in what we've built and how hard it is to actually transition from a legacy solution or three agents or a mixed model into a cloud architecture. And that's across the board for many of the companies that have been acquired. Specific to Dell and SecureWorks, we have a great relationship there, business as usual. And many people probably know that Carbon Black was the first partner with SecureWorks many, many years ago. So we look at this as a choice model, which is something that SecureWorks has always had. And again, we're seeing strong demand as evidenced by what we talked about with the Gardner Magic Quadrant and the leadership position. So ultimately, we think that the best technology is going to win out. And some of these relationships actually even predate us. However, we've been chosen by SecureWorks as one of their partners and we're excited to be there. And for us, it's business as usual. We'll let the customers decide which technology is best.

speaker
Sterling Audi
JP Morgan

That makes sense. And then one follow-up. If you look at the more recent modules that you've released, how is the adoption curve of those compared to some of the earlier modules that you launched?

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Well, I think we've talked probably at length on sort of the core modules that we go to market with. But if you look at things like Spotlight, I can tell you Windows OS vulnerabilities, as an example, is a huge pain point for customers that are out there. There's compliance issues. There is hygiene issues. And we've seen a tremendous increase in Spotlight. I highlighted one of those wins in my prepared remarks. And why are we seeing that? Well, it just works. You know, it's a scandalous technology. Companies don't want other agents on their system. If they have a scalable agent which is going to deliver real-time vulnerability information, that's what they're looking for. And the ability to actually have a customer try it with their own data with our frictionless in-app trial, I think, has been a big boon to us. So we've seen a lot of activity there. If you look at our threat intelligence modules, our Falcon X, the ability to automate a triage process and take something that would normally take eight hours and reduce that time to five minutes, with our sandbox technology and our malware search capabilities and our integrated intelligence, these have been very, very well received and, again, a tremendous, we've seen tremendous adoption in those areas. Great. Thank you.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Saket Kallia with Barclays. Your line is now open.

speaker
Saket Kallia
Barclays

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. First, maybe for you, George. Sorry to go back to the VMware carbon block question, but I think it's relevant. And I want to ask the question slightly differently about the Dell relationship or just the general PCOEM channel. Are there other PCOEMs that you think are interested in becoming a channel for CrowdStrike in the SMB sort of business vertical? And what are they saying to you?

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Well, we're not going to comment on any potential relationships there other than saying there is a tremendous amount of interest across all partner channels, whether it's OEM, whether it's traditional partners, whether it's cloud partners, because we're leading technology. So we spend a lot of time and we try to be very thoughtful in how we go to market and how we partner. And we're going to continue to do that. And what we're seeing is the customer demand. If you go out into the marketplace, the customers are asking their partners, whether it's a hardware vendor, whether it's a traditional reseller, whether it's a cloud service provider, whether it's a managed service provider. The partners are being asked about CrowdStrike. I've had a lot of meetings with the SIs and there's just tremendous pull for us. So, again, we're going to be thoughtful in how we go to market. But suffice to say, there's a lot of demand. And when the customers are asking for it, that's really when these partners take shape and you see the traction in the field together.

speaker
Saket Kallia
Barclays

That makes sense. Hey, for my follow up, maybe for you, Bert. Nice customer additions in the quarter. Can you just talk about the success you're having in the SMB channel versus Enterprise and maybe just touch on how you think about that mix impact on that ARR per customer metric?

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Zach. So I think we're seeing continued momentum in both the Enterprise and the SMB space. And we continue to invest in both. We continue to commission on both in the same manner. We continue to make sure that all the resources are available for both those markets. And today, what we're seeing is we're seeing continued positive pricing trends in both of those markets. So as we think about it going forward, we think about the volume that we're going to get from the SMB space and, of course, the bigger ticket items on the Enterprise space. And surely there'll be a little bit of an impact with respect to ARR per customer, but that's to be expected. And it's a positive thing. We think the volume is going to continue in the SMB space, certainly with our frictionless sales model. And we think that the large customers will continue to buy and expand.

speaker
Saket Kallia
Barclays

Very helpful. Thanks, guys.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from John DeFucci with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

speaker
John DeFucci
Jefferies

Thanks. First question is for George. And George, I'm sure we all got a lot of questions. We all continue to get a lot of questions about the VMware Carbon Black. So you're going to get it tonight. You probably have since it's happened. But that transaction, if you listen to what VMware is saying, who I'm sure you have a lot of respect for, the company and what they've done, it sounds eerily familiar. It sounds like what you guys say from a high level anyway, and how Endpoint is not really just Endpoint, but provides valuable data that can be leveraged across a lot of other areas and something that you've actually demonstrated. Maybe it makes sense. I mean, it makes sense to you. It makes sense to them. It makes sense to us. But other vendors that have tried to do things like this, a vendor that's not a traditional Endpoint vendor expanding into the Endpoint to try to make a bigger, you know, one plus one equals three kind of thing. One that's done that is Palo Alto Networks. I guess maybe if you can comment a little bit about competitive, on the competitive front, how Palo's done at least against CrowdStrike and when you come up against them with their trap solution and as they expanded to Endpoint. It might give us some insight on what might happen at VMware. Sure.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

So, you know, John, you've been around a long time. You've seen a lot of acquisitions. I've been part of two of them. They can be messy and disruptive. And at the end of the day, lots of companies that don't have necessarily security DNA are acquiring these companies. I think when, you know, you look at CrowdStrike, you look at our DNA, every day we wake up and we think about how do we protect customers from being breached and how do we build the best Endpoint technology? And that's what we're going to continue to focus on. Whether a company standalone or part of another company, it doesn't necessarily change the fact that there's a lot of hard work and transition that has to take place in moving from multiple agents into a cloud architecture. And we've been doing this since 2011 from day one and enjoy a first mover advantage. So I can only control what we can control, but I can tell you in the field what's most important as opposed to what any other vendor saying is what customers are saying. And I think you probably know I've been on my 100 by 100 journey, which is meeting 100 customers and prospects in 100 days. And, you know, I'm just about at my goal, at my quota, which is a good thing. So the feedback has universally been customers actually accelerating moving to CrowdStrike from our competitors as they try to transition from an on-premise solution, which has been slow and cumbersome. We met with one customer that had almost 40 different controllers and one person just to manage their on-premise implementation. And as other competitors try to accelerate their move to the cloud, it actually just creates another buying opportunity for CrowdStrike. If they're going to look at a cloud vendor, they might as well look at the best out there. So we like that dynamic. We view all these acquisitions as a net positive for us and we're excited. So that's a little bit about your first part of the question. The second part is with respect to Palo Alto. You know, again, what we see in the field is our technology being adopted much more rapidly than our competitors. We appreciate all competitors that are out there. We take everybody seriously. I would again probably refer you back to the Magic Quadrant, which is really a culmination of what Gartner and customers are saying to them. And you can look at where we're positioned and you can look at where others are positioned. But again, people are looking for the single agent architecture born in the cloud, not an amalgamation of three or four different acquisitions put together. So that hopefully answers that question for you. So thank you.

speaker
John DeFucci
Jefferies

It does. It does. Thanks, George. And if I could, Bert, you mentioned the international business and it just sort of hit me. You know, it kind of stands out 74 percent U.S., 26 percent international, realizing even given the scale you're at, you're not you're relatively young company. So that makes sense. But can you bring us up to speed on your efforts to sort of exploit that international opportunity? Because listen, it's obviously a popular solution. And it's part of the reason that international is 26 percent is because you started here. Right. So but it just seems like now might be especially I want to keep going back to it. I guess everybody will. But now the emir has got an international presence, right? So that they help somebody like carbon black now, at least help that presence. So I'm just curious, you know, what's what's the urgency is the wrong word. But how quickly can we see sort of that or at least bring us up to speed on your efforts to really exploit that international opportunity?

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, John. So to answer your question with respect to our efforts, we are putting a significant effort in international markets. We're pleased with our results. We're pleased with how we've done in those markets. We're always still being within our unit with our unit economics, whatever, you know, whatever metric you want to pull. We want to continue to be putting up on the board the results, but doing it in a very efficient manner. And whether it's here in the United States or in Canada or abroad, we still look at it the same way. We want to make sure we're not overspending in any particular region. We want to make sure we're spending in the right order of magnitude to go after the market that's available to us. And we feel that we've been successful and we also feel that there's there's more to come. There's a big opportunity abroad and we want to go capture that market.

speaker
John DeFucci
Jefferies

OK, just make sure Carp's got enough funds to make it happen. This is a great job, guys, and thank you. Thanks, John.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Matt Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

speaker
Matt Hedberg
RBC Capital Markets

Oh, hey, thanks for taking my question, guys. Your new customer edition has been just really impressive. I think if our math is right, I think you've added about a third of your base in the last two quarters. I'm curious, I know you're seeing, you know, rapid adoption of multiple products, even on net new sales. But when you're adding customers to this rapid pace, how do you think that that impacts sort of managing expansion and just overall retention with that sort of flywheel of new customer ads?

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Well, great. Thanks. This is George. Nothing really happens by accident. We spend a lot of time building a scalable sales architecture as we do a scalable technology architecture. And from my perspective, what we've been able to do is really consumerize the enterprise experience, the ability to try our products. The ability to have in-app trials and use your data to combine a very robust inside sales team and flighting within our products so we understand what customers are doing. So, you know, the rapid adoption, I think, is reflective of what we've built, but it also is reflective in what we've built from a -to-market perspective, not just a technology perspective. So from that standpoint, we spend a lot of time making sure that the customer journey is what it should be to land at CrowdStrike and have a great opportunity to sell them at least one module. From there, it begins the, you know, the cross-sell process, and there's multiple ways to do that. A lot of it is driven by the application itself, but inside sales or a field sales team are really important. And I think what we've been able to do and the check-ins and making sure that customers are using all the capabilities of the products and educating them has allowed us to keep, as we've discussed in the S1, a very high gross and net retention rate. So from my perspective, it is part of being a SaaS company and having the DNA. You know, we didn't start out as a perpetual license company. We didn't start out with a bunch of different products that we had to stitch together. We started out as a cloud-based endpoint security platform, and making sure that you keep your customers happy and keep them from being breached is of paramount importance to us, and that's our focus every day when we get up and get out of bed.

speaker
Matt Hedberg
RBC Capital Markets

That's great. And then, you know, George, in the prepared remarks, you talked about the Felkin Fund. I'm curious, you know, when you think about that as an investment opportunity, I mean, what are some of the secondary benefits? Is it, you know, potentially looking at M&A candidates, or is it, you know, just trying to make it more attractive to build on the CrowdStrike store?

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Well, I think first and foremost, it's investing in companies that are investing in us. We believe in the CrowdStrike store. We believe that we've built really the only platform that allows this level of what I would call platform as a service for an agent infrastructure. And we know the trend is consolidate agents. We know customers have come to us and said, we don't want yet another agent. We would rather use your agent and open up that architecture. So we believe in investing in companies who are going to embrace that, that the platform that we've built as well as build on top of it. So that's first and foremost. You know, we were delighted to team up with Excel, as many know, they started as our B investor. We've got a lot of respect for them. And I think just increasing our visibility and deal flow into small innovative companies, it does give us a look at other companies that are out there. And certainly potential acquisition candidates, but more importantly, creating the ecosystem. And we're putting where our mouth is to make sure that our partners are successful.

speaker
Matt Hedberg
RBC Capital Markets

That's great. Thanks a lot, guys. Well done. Thank you.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Gert Talpas with Stiefel. Your line is now open.

speaker
Gert Talpas
Stiefel

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. One for you, George, one for you, Bert. George, I have a kind of granular question here, just sort of given how many questions you've been getting on competition. And I want to ask about the relevancy and the type of telemetry that you collect, how it's differentiated from other endpoint vendors, and then the relative value of that data versus other security data types like network generated security data. I know it's pretty specific, but I think there's a lot of confusion out there with regard to what you do versus what everybody else does out there.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Sure. Thanks. Let me just let me try to start with the first part of the question. When we look at the telemetry we collect, we probably have the richest data set of telemetry out there. We've been able to really perfect how we collect it and do that in a very performing and cost effective manner with our smart filtering, which we've talked about a lot on the roadshow. And when we look at actually what we do, we're able to collect that data and store it in our cloud. A lot of our competitors actually keep most of the data resident on the endpoint because they haven't quite figured out how to get data. Up at scale without breaking a lot of things or causing a financial impact to the gross margins. So when they're looking at to pull data from an EDR perspective, they actually have to go back to the endpoint and query it. In fact, some of our competitors even use open source tools like OS query to go out and get the data as opposed to them actually having it, which is problematic if you have an ephemeral workload, it's just gone. So we believe the architecture we built is better. We believe we have the most events that you can actually pull from an endpoint. You can add more and customize it. So that's important for customers. And one of the things that's important is, again, the ability to get data even if that workload or PC or what have you is gone. And we have that all stored in the cloud. Again, many of our competitors, most of them keep all of that data resident as a little bit of data that goes up and they have to keep querying it. So what I will say is not all endpoints and EDRs are created equal despite some of the marketing noise that's out there. If you look at network data, I think the value of endpoint data is much higher than network data. You know, network data, you've got to sift through, you've got to look at flows and at a high level, you have to understand what's happening. With encrypted traffic and a lot of the attacks, it's very difficult to piece together what happened just with network flows. And that's why customers are demanding visibility on the endpoint. They can, with our system, they can tell down to the process exactly what is happening across a fleet of hundreds of thousands of computers, which you would never be able to do with a network product and network data. So, you know, again, network data can be valuable in certain areas, but we believe there's an exponential difference in the value of endpoint data.

speaker
Gert Talpas
Stiefel

That's super helpful. And then, Bert, for you, a lot of questions here about Dell. Can you walk us through maybe some of the assumptions you're making within your guidance and your framework about potential contribution from the Dell relationship as you look forward?

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Ger. So, as you know right now, it's really, you know, early days, as George mentioned, it's really a nascent part of the business and always viewed it as upside for our ARR model. So today we've baked very little in, you know, for the future for Dell. We want to be, we want to guide and we want to forecast based on information that we know, not what we don't know. That's helpful. Thanks so much and congrats on the results. Thanks.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Sarah Hindleyan with Macquarie. Your line is now open.

speaker
Sarah Hindleyan
Macquarie

All right, great. Thank you. I have several questions, so let's see. Okay, George, well, maybe starting with you, you know, Palo Alto made some pretty bold claims last night about win rates and end point and we're really in cortex EDR and traps. But it would be really great to hear from you guys in terms of where and when you actually do see Palo Alto and how they stack up.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Well, we don't see that much of them to be candid. And, you know, I think the gardener magic quadrant, rather than me saying where they stack up, you can tell where the analysts think they stack up. Right. And I it's not even close to us. So I'll let the reader be the judge of that. If you're going to give it away for free, that might give an indication of the value of it. But at the end of the day, customers are looking for a solution that is a true single agent architecture cloud native. And, you know, I think our financial results, our win rates are reflective of what we've been able to do in the marketplace.

speaker
Sarah Hindleyan
Macquarie

All right, great. That that certainly makes a lot of sense and matches the numbers. And Bert, I have a follow up for you as well. So four plus module adoption is progressing extremely well. It's definitely ahead of what I was expecting. And I think maybe it would be great if you could update us with a bit of ranking in terms of where you see burgeoning demand in the CrowdStrike portfolio beyond sort of your, you know, your core EDR and endpoint modules.

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, hi, Sarah. So, you know, today, you know, we're thinking about, you know, all the modules outside of those core three as equal potential, whether it be discover, whether it be spotlight, as George mentioned, you know, we see the potential of all those to continue to help with the trend in terms of how many modules our customers have today. I think what's interesting is we're seeing an accelerated pace with respect to our customers having five or more modules. So we're encouraged by those results.

speaker
Sarah Hindleyan
Macquarie

Awesome. Thank you so much. Congrats.

speaker
Host
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, we ask in the interest of time that you limit yourself to one question. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Nowinski with Piper Jaffrey. Your line is now open.

speaker
Andrew Nowinski
Piper Jaffrey

OK, thank you and congrats on the quarter. I have a number of questions. I guess if I'm limited to one, I'll ask on ARR. You had fantastic growth in ARR this quarter, but actually more impressive was the subscription customer growth. Given that customer growth actually outpaced your ARR growth last quarter or this quarter, I should say, I was wondering if you could give us any additional color on how to think about ARR growth going forward. Because your metrics really suggest it should not decelerate going forward.

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks. Thanks, Andrew. So again, when we think about ARR, of course we don't guide to it, but we do provide it. We think about ARR in the way we calculate it very simply. We take the ending ARR and we divide that by four and then we take out some contract and we add in some positive dollars for revenue in the quarter. So I think that when we look at our ARR and we look at our projections, we really do look at what we know in-house, not what we don't know. We've had some success in the past in running the tables. And we clearly don't want to guide based on the fact that we're going to run the table on all future quarters. So we've been happy with the results to date and that's how we think about our ARR. The last point I'll make on that is this quarter we had no outsized deals. So they came in throughout the quarter and there was nothing there that, there were no deals there that kind of really marked the quarter.

speaker
Andrew Nowinski
Piper Jaffrey

Great. Thanks, Bert.

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sefiger with JMP Securities. Your line is now open.

speaker
Eric Sefiger
JMP Securities

Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Gross margin, you had a nice gross margin in the quarter. I think it was probably above where the street was. A gross margin continuing to sustain these levels. And then could you speak to the two individual components between the subscription gross margin and the service gross margin, how we can think of that going forward?

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Sure. Thanks, Eric. So on the first part of the question, we're obviously very happy with the results. We think it's the continued success that we've had in modular adoption, the hybrid cloud strategy, the operational efficiencies that we've been able to gain. So we're pleased with where we are and certainly it's smack dab in the middle of our long term model. And I think that for us, as we think about forward, we're going to continue to apply those same techniques and same type of philosophy with respect to how to continue to maintain and continue to accelerate gross margin expansion. We are continuing to strive to get to the higher end of the long term range. And so we're going to do those things that will continue to get us there. With respect to professional services, we're continuing to look at the markets that we're in and we will continue to price accordingly. When there's a lot of price pressure, we're going to go in and we're going to be aggressive on our pricing in various geos. And it's been successful to date and we're going to continue with that strategy.

speaker
Eric Sefiger
JMP Securities

Very good. Thank you.

speaker
Burt Podbear
Chief Financial Officer

Thank

speaker
Eric Sefiger
JMP Securities

you.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Greg Moskowitz with Mizuho. Your line is now open.

speaker
Greg Moskowitz
Mizuho

Okay. Thank you. And I'll end my congratulations on a strong quarter. Question for George. It's fairly unique to offer EDR per mobile devices and so I'm curious how Falcon for mobile is resonating so far. What are your customers telling you?

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Yeah. Thanks. They're really excited about it because they don't have visibility into their mobile devices today. And again, our module is not an MDM. It's EDR for mobile. If you look at a lot of the news reports over the last number of months, you've seen how many misbehaving apps are out there that people really don't even know what they're doing. So a solution like ours gives a lot of visibility into what's happening and for corporate customers that really is growing and important. So we've got a lot of mobile trials, if you will, happening right now. So we're excited about that. Obviously, we launched it last quarter and we're encouraged, we're excited. We'll continue to iterate that module. But from a customer perspective, it really is something that they have consternation over because they really at this point have no visibility into these critical apps that are running within their environment or within BYOD devices from their employees.

speaker
Greg Moskowitz
Mizuho

That's great. Thanks very much.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Alex Henderson with Needham. Your line is now open.

speaker
Alex Henderson
Needham

Thank you very much. I was hoping you could tell me if you've seen any change in your pipeline as a result of the advent of going public. And has there been any change in the tax coming out of China as a result of the increased tension that you're seeing there? I think you guys are uniquely positioned to answer that latter question. Thanks.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Yeah, great. Thank you. So obviously, there's been a tremendous amount of visibility given the crowd strike and what we've been able to do over the last number of months. So we view that as a positive. Certainly interacting at very high levels now, CEO, board levels. We've been there, but I think more so post IPO. So we're excited about that level of engagement. I met with the CEO of an $8 billion company today and they were looking at various ways and working with CrowdStrike and they were really excited. They came in just to see us here in Sunnyvale. So I think we're getting to the table at the right levels. I think people are viewing us as a strategic component of their overall security architecture. And it's been a great event for us in terms of awareness, not only in the US, but more so outside of the US and our international markets. The second, I think, point of your question was really on attacks from China. I guess what I would say is whenever there's geopolitical instability, it's security is of the utmost importance. And whether it's a think tank or whether it's a government agency or whether it is a corporation, in times of instability, it really does drive awareness from a security perspective. So attacks will continue. They have been in place for many years and they're going to continue and we want to be there to make sure that we're protecting our customers.

speaker
Alex Henderson
Needham

Thank you.

speaker
Host
Operator

Our next question comes from Shawl Eyal with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

speaker
Shawl Eyal
Oppenheimer

Thank you for taking my question and congrats on the quarter and guidance, gentlemen. Just one quick question. Coming off on the theme, George's theme about the consolidation of the industry for legacy as well as next gen and virus solutions, has management teams seen any increase in sales motion as well as win rate on the pipeline as a result of this consolidation that's going on?

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Yeah, I mean if you look at some of the legacy players that are selling parts of their business, I think there's been a dramatic increase in acceleration. You have a lot of customers that were sort of on a natural cadence to look at a provider like CrowdStrike and I think it has accelerated and quite candidly, that's a huge opportunity for us as we see them. That's a massive opportunity. We're excited about that. It's actually accelerated them looking at other alternatives, in particular moving from their legacy on-premise architecture to something more contemporary like CrowdStrike. There's been many, many conversations we've had with large enterprise customers as they look to move away. Why? Their feelings, obviously they want something that's more contemporary and that really is focused on that single agent architecture, AI driven model. But I think there's real concern that the investment will not be there in some of these other providers after they get bought. It's going to be more managed at the bottom line as opposed to really driving innovation like we do at CrowdStrike.

speaker
Shawl Eyal
Oppenheimer

Thank you, George, for the color and congrats on the execution.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Great, thank you.

speaker
Host
Operator

I'm showing no further questions in queue at this time.

speaker
George Kurtz
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder

Great, thank you very much. Just wanted to close here. I want to thank all of you for your time today. We certainly appreciate your interest and look forward to speaking with you next quarter. And again, have a great day and we'll see you soon. Thank you.

speaker
Host
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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